Monthly Archives: May 2016

Japan, Personal

You, too, can make sushi

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I made sushi tonight.

There was no great reason behind it. I was bicycling around doing errands when I thought, hey, if I’m in Japan, I should try to make sushi.

So I gathered up what I thought were the ingredients. Wasabi, fish, rice. Then I found a recipe for sushi rice and went back to the convenience store for vinegar and soy sauce. Just follow the directions, cut up the fish really thin, make mounds of rice and attach each slice of fish to each mound with a dab of wasabi. Done.

There’s really no great ritual to it. No school you have to attend to be considered capable of making sushi. No certificate necessary to legally make sushi. And certainly no nationality test.

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Cooking

Basic pasta sauce +1

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In my mind, I have this idea for a cooking show/cookbook, where one half is about making a basic recipe (grilled cheese, rice pilaf, fresh pasta, etc.), while the other half is about adjusting the recipe to one’s tastes (hence the “+1”). And since the last post talked about the red wine I bought for the pasta sauce I made, well…

I couldn’t find any tomato puree or paste or a handful of other ingredients one finds in a pasta sauce recipe. But the basic ingredients are within easy reach of anyone near a decent supermarket in Japan.

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Japan

Bring a sweater next time

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One mile above sea level.
One mile above sea level.

Wikipedia does not have an English page for Shin-Shimashima Station.

Which is interesting, because the train fans have spent years making hundreds of new pages for each and every train station in Japan. There’s a page for both of the unused stations in the underwater tunnel between Aomori and Hokkaido. There’s a page for both stations at Narita Airport, because each requires a separate entry. There’s a page for every station on the Hokuriku Line, and the smallest of those stations probably service a population of 28 each. There is, of course, a page for that station that had only one passenger every day.

There is no page for Shin-Shimashima Station. Not remarkable enough or important enough to foreign tourists, I suppose. So on this trip around Nagano, I said let’s go there.

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Uncategorized

Politics on the social networks

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It rained during my hike around Norikura Kogen today, and it was a good fifteen degrees Celsius cooler than I planned for, so I took very few pictures of the trip, which I’ll add to tomorrow’s post. But on my 5K walk nearly one mile above sea level, I was thinking about politics for some reason.

I won’t post too much about politics on this blog. This is about my writing, my life in Japan, some soccer, and whatever other fun stuff comes to mind. And if you know me, you already know who I’m supporting this November. No, this post is more about friendships.

This isn’t meant to justify anyone’s boorish behavior on the social networks, especially mine. Rather, I thought it would be a good guide going forward for anyone who engages in heated discussion with friends. I think if you ask yourself the questions listed below when your politics get hot, and you find the answers are acceptable, you should be well covered, and no one, let alone you, should think less of you.

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